A Low Cost Modular Autonomous Robot Vehicle

In this paper, we describe a modular autonomous platform that is being used for research and education in cooperative multi-vehicle systems. A two-layer hierarchical architecture has been implemented and tested in realistic environments. The lower-level controller accepts velocity commands from the higher-level and takes care of the nonlinear dynamics of the vehicle. The higher-level controller, on the other hand, integrates motion coordination and Kalman filter based localization techniques. The result is a cost effective mobile, flexible robot platform ideal for research in cooperative robotics and motion-enabled sensor nets. Experimental results validate the performance of the mobile robot and architecture described herein